Risk-Taking, Prevention and Design

Most approaches that contribute to the design of life-critical systems almost only consider nominal situations where procedures can be developed and used to get satisfactory operations. These kinds of approaches lead to rigid ways of doing things, and poorly address needs for flexibility, especially when things go wrong. It is not a matter of human adaptation, but a matter of human systems integration (HSI) flexibility. HSI flexibility requires cross-fertilization of appropriate experiences combined with creativity. This book provides risk management approaches and methods for combining prevention and design.

The text-

* Discusses risk management approaches and methods for combining prevention and design.
* Examines a transdisciplinary approach to risk management in design and operations of safer life-critical systems.
* Proposes an approach of work analysis during design, which enables design teams to consider HSI issues early enough to fix organizational problems upstream.
* Teaches the combination of prevention and design for safety management.

The text gathers and analyzes relevant field data to rationalize human and systems activity in various life-critical environments and workplaces, in a systemic manner in a variety of safety domains (e.g., aviation, road, navy, manufacturing, hospital, transportation, defense, sport). It further formalizes and analyze risk-taking experience, expertise, stories about critical events, scientific and professional literature data to help engineering designers, managers and health & safety specialists.

The text is primarily written for graduate students and professionals working in the fields of occupational health and safety, ergonomics, and human factors, cognitive engineering, and human-system integration.